


Ending

by thedevilchicken



Category: Doom (2005)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Community: smallfandomfest, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 17:24:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4357865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam asks a simple question. John remembers more than he can tell her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ending

Sam was fine after, once they got up to the surface and out into the Nevada sunlight, once the med team had checked them both out and pronounced them bafflingly fine, once they’d been through a week of endless, constant debriefs and come out the other side of it. She seemed to get through it pretty lightly, picked her version of events and stuck with it absolutely till it was almost like she believed the lie she was spinning. The way she told it, the Marines of the RRTS were heroes. Every last one of them. He thought he’d have to remember to thank her for that one day.

No one really knew what had happened but the two of them and that was A-OK by him. No data had made it out with them, no video, only garbled audio so it came down to a story they told that sounded enough like everything the Marines and UAC found down there in the Nevada side of the Ark facility that no one could disprove it. Sam said they’d destroyed the Ark from the Mars side so the creatures wouldn’t and couldn’t get through and the RRTS orders had pretty much supported that as an outcome, quarantine considered. The Marine brass couldn’t prove or disprove anything either of them said so they called him a hero too, pinned a medal on his chest and gave him a fucking promotion. He had to hand it to them; when they suspected a holy fucking mess that no one wanted to dirty their hands with, they covered pretty well.

They gave him his own team after that, said they’d let him pick and choose his recruits but that just kind of pissed him off so the CO of the RRTS program went ahead and chose them for him. They were good guys, it turned out, seasoned guys, guys who only briefly wondered what the fuck had happened out on Olduvai that had wound up with the rest of his team dead before they got pretty much immediately deployed to the middle of a freaking jungle to locate a downed chopper and evac the crew. They ran about between the trees, tripping over undergrowth, John feeling suspiciously like an extra from fucking _Predator_ till they stumbled over a drug operation and by the time they’d made it back to base at Twentynine Palms with their rescued chopper crew, bloody and irritated and worn the hell out but safe, pretty much safe, he knew he’d got his team. And his team knew they’d got a leader. 

He spent his birthday the next year with Sam on a dig site over in Asia, someplace with mass graves that depressed the hell out of all the staff on a daily basis, left them oddly subdued and slightly surly even in the evenings when even archaeologists usually liked to let their hair down and basically meant it was just a fraction less dangerous than Olduvai. They lit a candle in a muffin in the finds tent in the searing afternoon sun, sweating it out as they took half each because there was no way they were hauling a cake out there in the site’s beat-up old Jeep from the closest town. And then, as he poured them both a glass of wine like the cheap merlot was a good match for the almost-stale chocolate chip muffin mix, she asked him what he’d done last year. 

“I was on base,” he said, offhand, and took a sip of his shitty red wine to blow off the rest of that conversation because he had no clue how to explain it to her. Besides, _on base_ had the benefit of actually being true. She didn’t press, thank God for small mercies, though apparently she still knew him well enough after all that time to know when he was hiding something. She just raised her brows for a second like maybe she was going to say something else, but then she lifted her glass instead. 

“Here’s to another year,” she said. 

He chuckled briefly, clinking his glass against hers. “Another year,” he said. Neither of them sounded hugely cheerful about the prospect. 

He’d been on base that day, the year before. All the others had been out on leave except him and Sarge though he guessed technically they’d been on leave too, just not exactly out; where the hell the rest of the team had gone he didn’t know because he did _not_ want to know, knowing them all as he did. So he was on leave but he was there on base with a bottle of bourbon that he didn’t even like at the card table in Sarge’s room, drinking more from old birthday habit than any real desire to do it, like somehow it had gotten to be a birthday tradition for the two of them. He’d sent a card to Sam, always did, a cursory note about how he was doing and wishing her well wherever the hell she was - _Mars_ , as it turned out – but that just reminded him of their mom and dad and Olduvai. Sarge got it. He drank with him, let him stew in bourbon and his own juices while they sat there, evening turning into night. 

Of course, he only ever let him stew for so long and then he’d slap his hands down on the table, spill one drink or both and make John look up at him from over the rim of his chipped old glass. The way Sarge smiled was damn near infectious with those fucking ridiculous ice-white teeth and John would smile wryly in return, reluctantly, like he was vaguely pissed at being coaxed out of his self-indulgent melancholy. That’s what he did that night, leaning back in his seat almost to the point of tipping it over, rocking back with the toes of his boots like it could end any other way than badly.

He fell. Of course he did because rocking a chair back on two legs while hilariously drunk had always been a bad idea, which was something he knew while sober but had ceased to make sense after his last drink. The chair hit the deck and he spilled bourbon down his chest, ice cubes sitting on his t-shirt as he lay there. Sarge laughed at him as he blinked up into the shitty fluorescent lights that sometimes flickered and buzzed like they were doing then like a fucking strobe light at a rave. He felt dizzy.

Sarge came around the table, held out an arm that he took to haul him to his feet. They wound up too close, clasping arms as the room started to tilt around him and Jesus Christ he hated being drunk. He liked being in control and this was the opposite, liked control though he’d apparently decided the life of a Marine was totally for him in spite of that. He liked to think he made a good one, always had on his proficiency reports, FITREPs. Then again, Sarge was the one who sent those in; he was pretty sure they weren’t fabrications but sometimes it was pretty hard to tell what was going on in the guy’s head. 

They were too close but he guessed that was the intention, maybe not in the start but it became that way pretty fast. Sarge eyed him, that appraising way he’d look over a situation and then bark out orders that usually led straight to their objective, the way he summed new guys up before they’d even spoken like he’d got some kind of in-built on-board bullshit detector. John knew what was coming was one of two things: he’d either sit back down and pour another glass and John would let the ice cubes melt on the floor or it would go in the _other_ direction. 

It went the other way. Sarge kissed him, hard, free hand going up to the back of his head to hold him there, hold him in like John was going to protest when he’d stopped protesting at least a couple of years before that. He kissed him back, all bourbon and maudlin self-pity, taking two fistfuls of shirt at the small of Sarge’s back. The door was already locked, he’d known that from the start so maybe he’d known this was the way the night would end all along when Sarge stepped back and pulled the chair back upright, pushed him firmly down onto it by his shoulders and then went down on his knees. 

He could still remember how that felt, the way he’d laughed drunkenly when Sarge smirked at him, kneeling in spilled bourbon but it didn’t seem either of them gave a damn as he unbuckled John’s belt and tugged his worn green fatigues down over his hips. He remembered the lazy swirl of Sarge’s tongue, the things he did with his fingers, remembered watching him do it. He guessed Happy Birthday blowjobs had been one of the perks of his position, not that he’d ever be able to say that to Sam. There were things he was pretty sure she didn’t need to know.

They’d been doing it for years by that point, since about four months after John had made staff sergeant and gotten himself reassigned to Asher Mahonin’s squad in the process. It’d been pretty clear right off the bat that he was going to get along with the guy in a chain-of-command kind of way, the fact that two days in they’d deployed and he was straight out in the thick of it because Sarge had somehow gotten the measure of him already after just some quick on-base training and a cursory glance at his service record. And they got out of there, mission accomplished, without a scratch on any of them. Not every mission was like that after, not every objective was always achieved to the letter, but they were a damn good team, a solid team, orders passing down smoothly from CO to gunnery sergeant to staff sergeant to the rest of the team like they’d been doing it for years. 

Then they all came back in from a near day-long flight back across the world and while Duke and Destroyer had some kind of loud but pretty much essentially good-natured argument by their bunks and Goat settled down with his Bible, John went with Sarge to write reports in Sarge’s room because for some damn fool reason it doubled as his office with a desk and a PC over in the corner. He’d offered to help. He hadn’t realised what else he’d apparently offered. 

It was the first time they’d talked about anything other than the job in those first four months of his assignment, not like he’d been avoiding it but he’d never exactly felt like broadcasting his history or his private life. He mentioned his parents, his twin sister, Sarge said something that was meant to be funny and later John remembered grimacing at it because it wasn’t funny at all, at least not right then and not to him. Sarge got it after that, didn’t know the details but he knew something must have happened; a few days later he’d read it in his file and they spoke about it but right then what he did was tell him some idiot story about how he’d wound up nicknamed _Sarge_ way the fuck back in kindergarten so there’d only been about a three-year period in his whole damn life when nickname had matched title. Then he’d gone up to staff sergeant, gunnery sergeant, and though _Gunny_ would’ve made sense at that point he was still stuck with _Sarge_ though it confused the hell out of anyone who saw his insignia. John actually found that kind of amusing in spite of himself, even though it wasn’t particularly amusing. He guessed the guy just told a good story, like he’d been an actor in a former life. 

And when Sarge moved, leaned over the back of John’s chair, ran one hand down between his legs and squeezed, somehow it kind of made sense. It was fucked up but it made sense because Sarge could size a guy up in fifteen seconds or less and bone-tired as John was he couldn’t’ve leapt out of the way if he’d tried. It wasn’t till after he’d let Sarge shove one hand down his pants and stroke him till he came in them that he really thought to protest and by that point it was pretty fucking late. He left the room feeling confused, but mostly just damp.

They didn’t talk about it; it was pretty much like it’d never happened except the next time they came in from assignment it happened again and that time John stood, quickly, turned and frowned and Sarge just looked at him with his brows raised like it made no sense that he didn’t want to do it. John guessed what he’d done really hadn’t made sense because he _did_ want to do it, could feel the adrenaline in him from the idea of it making his pulse race and his dick hard. It was dumb. It was _really_ dumb with the rest of the team in the next room with only a thin wall and two doors between them. But, apparently, that wasn’t going to stop them.

Sarge locked the door, turned the key deliberately as he looked back at him over his shoulder but he wasn’t locking them in as much as he was locking everyone else. That thought, knowing Sarge knew he was objecting on grounds that were nothing to do with sex or sexuality, that he was objecting because they were in a barracks full of other guys and they were Marines and Sarge was his fucking superior and this would screw protocol all to hell. He didn’t want to screw around with a guy he had to take orders from afterwards. Apparently Sarge thought the solution to that was to pull John’s pants straight down around his knees and blow him as he leant against the nearest wall. It was a pretty good start. 

The mission after that it was the same damn thing; they got in, the boys set about whooping it up in the next room and Sarge and his staff sergeant sat down in Sarge’s not-quite-office to write up the report. The report got written but John was anticipating what might happen next the whole damn time till Sarge closed down the PC and he stood, took off his shirt and then his undershirt, showing off tattoos John hadn’t actually seen on him since he’d transferred in. It was weird, watching him do it as he hitched up one foot onto the seat he’d just deserted so he could unlace one boot then the other, toe them off and kick them aside, but he watched. He watched as he unbuckled his belt, the suggestive smile he gave him so damn far from subtle it was like a half-playful slap in the face. Sarge got real naked real fast and John watched him do it like he wasn’t wondering what the hell was happening, the whole thing so damn disconcerting considering the setting and the fact they’d just sent off a report on a successful seek-and-destroy to their higher-ups and both needed a shower and eight hours’ sleep. 

Sarge raised his brows as one hand went down around his half-hard cock. “This ain’t a spectator sport, Reaper,” he said, and turned for his bunk across the room. He had no idea what the fuck he was meant to do next, guessed he appreciated the fact that Sarge had left the key in the door in case he’d wanted to bolt but that would’ve felt suspiciously like admitting defeat. And so, as Sarge lounged there on his bed like a total asshole and watched his every move with that same damn smile like a neon sign across his face, a look that would’ve been laugh-out-loud ridiculous on anyone else but him, John started to strip out of his clothes, too. 

It felt like a dare and he told himself that was what it was when he went across the room to Sarge’s bunk, feet cold on the bare floor. The bed was made military-style, tight corners, neat, and he knelt on the side of it like that didn’t look like he was wussing out on the whole thing and he wasn’t, he _wasn’t_. He told himself to man the fuck up and moved to straddle Sarge’s pretty damn huge thighs and lean down against the tubular metal headboard; he caught their cocks in his free hand, rubbed them together, made Sarge laugh under his breath as he watched him do it. Frankly the length of time it had taken for them both to get off like that, Sarge’s hand going over John’s to make him squeeze harder, was pretty embarrassing when he thought back over it. 

He remembered how that had carried on for five months, how every time they’d come back in from assignment they’d wound up getting off together in a chair or stretched out on Sarge’s bunk, up against a wall, hot and hard and stupid. He’d started looking forward to it, waiting for Sarge to close down the damn PC after the report went through, waiting for him to look at him that way that meant things were going to get messy, till eventually he was the one who started it, one night when they’d gotten in from a nasty little firefight down in South America when he didn’t even wait till after the report. He followed him into the room, let him lock the door and then the next thing he knew he’d got Sarge pushed up against the nearest available wall with his mouth pressed to his like it’d be the end of the fucking world if he didn’t. 

Sarge took that turn of events pretty well, John had thought later, after, when it was all done. Sarge had dragged him over to the desk and as they made out like there was absolutely no tomorrow he fumbled in a drawer, pulled out a tube of lube and a box of condoms and made John laugh against his mouth because damn that was the stupidest idea he’d ever heard in his life. But they did it, just like that because why the fuck not; Sarge turned and they both unbuckled their belts, shoved down their pants, then Sarge looked back over his shoulder to watch as John rolled on a condom and nearly failed. He leaned down over the desk and John slicked himself thickly with the lube, grimaced as he rubbed the excess off of his hand with his own shirt and then pushed into him. It didn’t take long. He hadn’t fucked a guy in years, not since he’d joined the Marines, and somehow the fact that the guy he was doing it with was his immediate superior just made it better, made it hotter, or just plain made it worse.

It had gotten more frequent after that, starting just a couple of days later in communal showers after lights-out rather than waiting for a mission, stupid and he guessed they’d both known it when they’d got in from the range pretty damn late, decided they’d both feel better for washing the day off of them and the next thing they knew they were soaked through under the same shower head, getting each other off with their hands. They sneaked out of a card game a week later and John went down on his knees experimentally, at the side of Sarge’s bed as Sarge sat there, blew him though it was nothing he’d ever done before in his life. Three days after that he did it again, though Sarge’s oddly military encouragement made him laugh till he had to stop to compose himself. 

There was a mission after that, somewhere in the Middle East though John was sketchy on the details. It went kind of sideways and Goat got shot in the shoulder, three civilians died as well as the insurgents and it was fucked, totally fucked. He was wrist-deep in some guy’s chest till they evaced, all his med training pretty much useless as the guy died there on the ground in the dirt and a wide pool of blood and John couldn’t wash it off his fingerless gloves, couldn’t get it out from under his nails or off of his kit. It was in the spaces where the paint had worn off of the edges of his gun for months and he was pretty sure that wasn’t just his mind playing tricks.

He remembered getting back to base a couple of days later and having no clue how they’d write a report that didn’t sound like someone up the chain had fucked up entirely. Sarge told him he’d take care of it alone as John paced around the room, agitated, pissed at himself and at just about everyone else involved and somehow Sarge knew diffusing the situation with humour just wasn’t going to work this time. He _ordered_ him to calm the fuck down instead, perfectly serious, perfectly commanding, and John knew right then like he’d never known it before just how screwed up the situation that he’d gotten himself into really was. 

He remembered how he’d laughed, laughed some more, had had to sit down because he was damn near hysterical with it until Sarge slapped him across the face and that got his attention. Then Sarge told him to strip, so he did. He told him to get up on the bed on his knees and so he did. He told him to relax and he did that, too. He felt Sarge rub the head of his lubed-up cock between his cheeks then the blunt press of it against him before he pushed in, hands all over John’s ass, his thighs, one wrapping around his erection to stroke him as he moved. John pressed his face into the mattress and as Sarge’s dog tags hung down and grazed his back he felt better for it, he really did, for letting him do it, for bucking back against him as he came. 

It had carried on for a couple of years after that, maybe three, just as dumb each and every time as it had ever been before but no one ever questioned why the two of them spent so much time together. It was maybe something about the way they worked as a team making it seem like the gunnery sergeant and the staff sergeant just had a great working relationship when nothing about it worked or was particularly work-related. They screwed on bases across the world when they had to stay more than 24 hours, once did it in the crew compartment of a Navy plane till the turbulence fucked it up and they waited till they got back to California. And when Sarge didn’t use his leave to visit family, they both stayed on base and laughed and drank and fell into bed and it had never mattered if they’d drifted off drunk and half-naked in the same bed because there’d been no one else there to see in the morning. 

Sam’s dig site was shitty, like all dig sites John had ever visited because Olduvai hadn’t been the only place his parents had worked before the accident. There were people everywhere with different specialisms, people who all tried to talk over each other at mealtimes though that seemed pretty familiar given his experience of military mess halls. He and Sam didn’t bother with the mess tent that day; they moved from the finds tent to Sam’s tent, practically a damn marquee considering the tents he’d seen in the Marines, sat at the table and finished off the bottle of wine as afternoon turned to evening, reminisced though he despised reminiscence. 

He was stronger then, faster, senses heightened, had to remind himself to slow down as he ran with the team sometimes when they trained or were deployed just so they wouldn’t look at him like he’d just gotten in on a bus from Neptune or at least absconded from the Olympic village. He was more intelligent and he could see clearly just how dumb it’d always been to trust a guy who could shoot someone in the head and not flinch as they dropped to the ground. Behind the smile, the occasional goofy, toothy grin, the bad sense of humour, he’d always been that guy he’d turned out to be. He’d always been a killer, and John could see then, as Sam didn’t talk about their last time visiting Mars though he could see there were a hundred questions in her about how he’d been since, how he felt, what he could _do_ , he could see why it was that Sarge had made a play for him in the first place. Sarge had looked at him and what he’d seen, what he’d always seen, had led him to believe John Grimm was just like him. 

In the end, Sarge’s legendary ability to size a guy up had been proved wrong. In the end, John hadn’t been like him in any way that counted. It didn’t help knowing that John had been wrong about it, too. 

“You’re a million miles away,” Sam said, just a statement, not the reproof it once might’ve been. Things were better with the two of them than they’d been in years like Olduvai had been perversely good for them. Maybe they’d even spend Thanksgiving together that year, who knew, tofurkey on the menu so they couldn’t give each other food poisoning in new and interesting ways. They’d both been too busy for cookery class, he guessed.

“I was back on Olduvai,” he told her and she nodded like she understood. She couldn’t understand and he wasn’t about to try to tell her he was still pissed off that Sarge had gone out that way. She remembered him as a lunatic whose reputation she’d eventually saved in order to save her brother. He remembered more than that himself, lives Sarge had saved and lives he’d taken, a flash of a smile as they dropped in from the sky and went in hot. Maybe that was the confusion Sarge had had; they’d seemed alike and they’d both sought out a billet outside the norm of Marine service, but they’d never done it for the same reasons. 

“They’re planning to go back,” Sam said, and John nodded; he knew already because he’d been asked to head the advance team to clear the place out, said no and then gotten orders to do it anyway. He’d tell her before he left but they didn’t need to spend their birthday mired in the past. But when he left her tent and went to his, a shitty two-man Marine-issue sleeper he’d borrowed from the barracks back in California, it wasn’t the future he was thinking of. He was thinking of Asher Mahonin and everything, _everything_ they’d done together. His new improved superhuman brain let him see it all in glorious Technicolor, getting him hard, making his pulse pick up.

He wasn’t sure how it had been meant to end because it had been pretty much doomed from the start and he knew it, maybe they both had. He wasn’t sure how it’d been meant to end so instead as he touched himself he thought about easy smiles and crisp commands, a weekend’s leave in Vegas when they won a couple of thousand bucks and spent it all on booze and a hotel room where they screwed on sheets with a higher numbered threat count than Portman could’ve counted to then bitched over reality TV on a screen nearly as big as the wall till they fell asleep. He was thinking how with a little time and a couple of experts they could’ve maybe found a cure and not just blown Sarge to kingdom come. He was thinking about how Sam had gotten all of them labelled heroes, like that was true somehow and they didn’t just shoot to kill when told to. They were Marines, after all.

When he drifted into wine-aided sleep that night he wasn’t thinking about what he’d gained but everything he’d lost. He wasn’t sure how it had been meant to end for them, but this wasn’t it.


End file.
